Lewis Hamilton had come within a point of the title in his first season. In 2007 he became the youngest driver ever to lead the championship, then lost a 12-point lead in the second half of the year and finished one point behind Kimi Räikkönen. The MP4-23 was McLaren's car for the second attempt.
McLaren revealed it at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart on 7 January 2008, and it first ran at Jerez two days later. Paddy Lowe, Neil Oatley, Tim Goss, Andrew Bailey and Simon Lacey designed the chassis, and behind the driver sat the Mercedes FO 108V, a 2.4-litre V8. That year the FIA brought in a standard ECU for every team and banned traction control, which made the MP4-23 the first McLaren since the MP4-16 of 2001 to race without it. Against the MP4-22 it had a longer wheelbase and a new rear wing and lost the "bullhorn" winglets on its airbox; from Hungary it carried "dumbo wings" on the nose. It was one of the last cars of the era of complex aerodynamic appendages, which were banned for 2009.
Hamilton won on the car's debut in Australia, then at Monaco, at a wet Silverstone by more than a minute, at Hockenheim and in China. At Spa he crossed the line first and was given a 25-second penalty for gaining an advantage while fighting Räikkönen, which handed the win to Massa. His teammate Heikki Kovalainen took his first Grand Prix win in Hungary when Massa's engine failed. The car finished the year with six wins and eight poles from 18 races, and McLaren second to Ferrari in the constructors' championship on 151 points.
It came down to Interlagos on 2 November. Hamilton arrived seven points clear of Massa and needed fifth; Massa won the race from pole. Rain came back in the closing laps, and on lap 69 Hamilton ran wide and Sebastian Vettel took fifth from him. Timo Glock had stayed out on dry tyres, and on the last lap they could not hold the wet track: Hamilton passed him in the final corners for fifth and won the title 98 points to 97. At 23 years and 300 days he was the youngest champion there had been, until Vettel in 2010, as well as the first Black driver to win the title and the first British champion since Damon Hill in 1996.
DeAGOSTINI Japan launched 週刊 マクラーレン MP4-23 on 5 October 2010 and completed it with issue 65 on 4 January 2012: a weekly partwork that builds a 1/8 display model of Hamilton's car, developed jointly with McLaren. Kyosho made the model. This is the Japanese edition, bought from Japan as a complete set. The English-language ModelSpace edition of the same car ran to 85 issues and began with the front wing.